La bellezza dell’ordinario. Su Hegel, la pittura olandese del Seicento e Jeff Wall

Abstract

Moving from a kind of family resemblance between the two works, this paper suggests an interpretation of Jeff Wall’s Morning Cleaning in the mirror of Pieter Janssens Elinga’s Interior with painter, a woman reading and a servant sweeping the floor or, more precisely, of Elinga’s work in light of Hegel’s interpretation of Dutch painting. In particular, Hegel’s observations help to highlight how both works have the same effect of providing an aesthetic elevation of the everyday and the ordinary. Like the Dutch painters, Wall discovers that the everyday can be a domain of the aesthetic, a space in which meanings accumulate. Hegel helps us appreciate how the pictorial realization carries meaning into the realm of the aesthetically pleasurable, and at the same time to acknowledge that this realm and the domain of art in which we experience, to use one of his expression, a kind of «Sonntag des Lebens», is nothing more than a kingdom of semblances.